


somehow that isn't so bad

by jonphaedrus



Category: Tales of Symphonia
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, biases showing fucking everywhere, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-24
Updated: 2014-09-24
Packaged: 2018-02-18 15:46:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2353844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She kisses Sheena last, and Sheena blushes the same colour as her heir’s pants, and mumbles something about that being inappropriate for them to do in public, so Colette does it again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	somehow that isn't so bad

**Author's Note:**

> em prompted me something about colette after the game, growing up and doing things she never thought she'd get to do and uh. well. it grew okay i like hurting myself.
> 
> major character death all over the board and ALL kinds of biases showing.

When Colette turns eighteen, she giggles and kisses everybody that she thinks she can get away with it with. She kisses Lloyd, and he blushes red to the tips of his ears and awkwardly stutters and then hugs her. She kisses Genis—but on the cheek, and he grunts at her more than anything. She kisses Raine on the cheek too, and Raine hugs her for a long time in return. She kisses Zelos, and he kisses her back, and it’s surprisingly not bad, and his eyes look a little bit when they break apart. She kisses Presea, and it’s a little bit weird until she remembers that Presea is like ten years older than her, and Presea smiles at her.

 

She kisses Sheena last, and Sheena blushes the same colour as her heir’s pants, and mumbles something about that being inappropriate for them to do in public, so Colette does it again.

 

—

 

When Colette is twenty-one, Regal gravely presents her with a bottle of wine that he says he’s been saving for over twenty years, and Colette takes it with honour. At her party, she pours a half glass for everyone including herself, and by the end of the night she’s hiccuping and tipsy, a little bit wobbly on her feet (but at least she isn’t Zelos, who is sideways on the floor mumbling something completely inaudible to the miraculously-sober Lloyd, who just keeps nodding like he understands everything Zelos means), and Sheena and her stumble up the stairs together, mostly because Sheena has the best balance when sober or drunk and Colette has the worst (when sober or drunk) and they end up collapsed on her bed together, laughing wildly, and she isn’t sure when they started holding hands.

 

—

 

“Oh, she’s beautiful!” Colette whispers, twenty-five, as she kneels down by the basinette of Raine and Regal’s daughter, who cooes up at her, small fingers grasping in the air, wide-smiling with a tuft of powder-blue hair already growing out of her head.

 

“Yes, but she pees everywhere,” Raine replies, shaking her head, as she comes over with a blanket. “I’ve yet to decide whether I’m pleased.” Colette smiles and says nothing as her teacher tucks her daughter in, smoothing the knit blanket that Presea had made for her around her legs, and leans down to kiss her forehead. Colette’s heart feels six sizes too big as she leans back over the baby, sniffing to keep from crying, and whispers to her,

 

“Hi, Alicia. I’m your Auntie Colette. It’s nice to meet you!”

 

—

 

At thirty, Colette decides she’s going to have an adventure. Regal, swinging his daughter by her hands, says he can’t go, although he wishes he could. Raine, now running the Sybak Academy and Rhearding home on the weekends, sniffs and says “Maybe after finals, but I just don’t think it will work out this year Colette, I’m sorry.”

 

Genis, he doesn’t even bother. When she interrupts him at his work in the Library he just awkwardly says he’s got a dissertation draft due and he loves her but not until he gets his degree. Lloyd and Zelos just kind of look at each other, and then Lloyd finally says “Why not?” and Zelos shrugs, so she has two along for the ride. Presea agrees enthusiastically, looking forward to a chance to just go and see and _be_ for a little while, even though she’s getting a little bit old for it.

 

Colette doesn’t even need to ask Sheena. She shows up, arms crossed and long black hair braided over her shoulder, and she smiles. “So I hear you want to have an adventure?”

 

It’s not quite old times, but it’s close. It’s good.

 

—

 

“I kind of want to have a baby,” Colette says, at thirty-five, and Sheena looks up from what she’s doing at her little desk in the house that used to be her grandfather’s, her hair loose and just tied low on her back. “I mean, even Raine enjoyed it. I wonder who we know who we could convince into helping.”

 

“What,” Sheena replies, and this is how Colette ends up wheedling Lloyd into trying out the Tethe’allan artificial insemination technology, and this is how Colette ends up with a bouncing, brown-haired baby boy with her big blue eyes and spikes already showing up in his fluffy down that she knows will eventually be as unkempt as Kratos’ hair was, and they name him Igaguri, after Sheena’s grandfather, may he rest in peace.

 

—

 

At forty, Colette stands in front of a mirror in their house, sighs, and shakes her head. “I want to try something new,” she says, more to herself than to anybody, so she packs up an overnight back and flies off to Meltokio, where she meets Seles, housesitting for Zelos, and she lets the other woman cut her hair off, each long blonde lock she’s had the same since childhood sloughing off to the floor leaving her lighter, feeling fresh and new, until Colette looks in the mirror, at her short bob-cut, and beams before she whispers, “It looks so nice!”

 

—

 

At forty-two, Colette looks at Genis intently, tapping her lip, and finally nods at Lloyd, who groans.

 

“No,” she sighs, shaking her head. “He’s definitely taller than you.” Genis whoops like a man much younger and tosses his hands in the air, and she finds herself laughing, never expected to see this of all things.

 

—

 

Regal dies when Colette is fifty-two, and although Sheena keeps murmuring _he was so young_ she understands the way that Raine’s face clouds, older than she is, and she shakes her head.

 

“He lived a hard life.” She squeezes her youngest’s hand, who is twelve and keeps crying. “I’m honestly surprised he lasted this long.” Her granddaughter, Virginia, is wrapped up in Colette’s arms for the funeral, and she’s only three, but she still sniffs and snuffs and leans on her Auntie Colette’s shoulder, her mother’s powder-blue hair stained with tears as she holds onto Colette’s sleeve. “Prison…does things, to you.”

 

“I know,” Colette whispers, watching as Lloyd finishes shovelling dirt over the grave they made Regal, right next to Alicia in the garden—where he probably would have wanted to be, for her and for himself. “But it doesn’t make it any easier that they’re starting to go.”

 

“I know what you mean,” Raine whispers, and it’s hard for Colette to think that someday it will be only her and Genis and Yuan at his ancient tree left.

 

—

 

Seles dies young, and when Lloyd finally asks her and Sheena to come, Zelos has had himself locked in his bedroom for a week. His hair is matted, his eyes are dead and baggy, and Lloyd has to cajole him with the kind of rough love Colette remembers Dirk having when he was very young just to get him to eat broth.

 

“I don’t know what he expected,” Sheena whispers later, as they help Lloyd finish packing to get Zelos out somewhere, anywhere. “She was always so sick.”

 

“He expected to get killed,” Colette replies, clenching her hands in the cloth that she’s holding—an old winter coat, one she can remember Lloyd making, her knuckles red with the tell-tale sign of the late fifties. She doesn’t add, _I did too._

 

—

 

“Oh, what a sweet boy,” Colette whispers, bouncing her grandson on her leg. He gurgles and waves his hands about and she laughs, resisting the urge to pinch his cheeks. “I think he really looks like his grandfather, don’t you?”

 

Sheena leans over, and brushes his dark hair out of his face, and the tell-tale cowlick that sticks straight up. She smiles, her cheeks wrinkling.

 

“You know? He really does.”

 

“Good thing that they named him Kratos!” Colette laughs, and it hurts—but at least they will have something to remember him by forever. Sixty-four, and a grandmother. She can understand now, why the first Kratos would have given up everything for a family.

 

—

 

“It’s all right,” Colette mumbles, wiping the tears from her eyes as Zelos and Lloyd watch her, Igaguri holding her hand. “You know, I think if anything, she would have wanted to go like that.”

 

Colette was seventy-nine, and Sheena had finally lost a fight to one of her students. It had been an accident…but the kind of one she would have found funny. If she had survived it.

 

—

 

Lloyd and Zelos go in the same week, and Colette never expected anything else.

 

—

 

“It’s hard sometimes,” Presea says, leaning on one hand as they play checkers in the other woman’s house, still old and homey, in Ozette. “To remember that they’re gone.”

 

“I know what you mean,” Colette sighs back, reaching out to hop one of the other woman’s pieces. It’s hard to remember that Presea, even though she looks a few years younger than Colette’s eighty-five, is actually well over a hundred.

 

It’s hard to remember that soon enough they’ll both be gone, and then just Raine and Genis, for hundreds of years.

 

And that will be the end, except for Yuan, standing by a tree. And somehow that isn’t so bad.

 


End file.
